Make your own natural homemade perfume

Making your own signature perfume with a vegetable oil and a few essential oils is accessible to everyone. Yes, really, no joke!

In this post, I’m offering a simple method to make your own scented roll-on, or a solid version. As a bonus: my personal blend, to inspire you.

Because even if we want to be minimalist, scents transport us, set the mood, and cheer us up (or disgust us, depending on the person!).

Walking past a blooming lilac and being reminded of a sweet moment from our childhood. Smelling wood smoke and being transported to a midsummer evening around a campfire. Or entering a forest and being automatically calmed by the smell of conifers.

Sense of smell and memory are intimately linked. It’s no coincidence that perfumery is an art form that dates back as far as the Sumerian era. If you are interested in this topic, I invite you to take a look at the works of Élisabeth de Feydeau, a historian specializing in the subject.

SCENTS WITH AN AFTERTASTE…

With industrialization and the rise of chemistry in the 19th century, the ancestral art of perfumery was transformed. Synthetic fragrances entered the scene. This lovely catch-all term groups together hundreds of molecules. However, the law protects companies and allows them not to disclose the composition. Many synthetic fragrances are derived from the oil industry and may contain phthalates, irritants, or even endocrine disruptors, which, in addition to being bioaccumulative in the food chain, are persistent in the environment and toxic to aquatic flora and fauna.

Obviously, "synthetic" doesn't necessarily mean "toxic." But very often, for cost reasons, large companies turn to fragrances with questionable ingredients to scent their products.

A high price to pay to smell like a rose, right?

It was actually these famous synthetic perfumes that were my starting spark. It was precisely when I discovered the various problems surrounding the "fragrance" ingredient in commercial products that I decided to rethink my entire skincare routine, and I discovered, along the way, the wonderful world of homemade cosmetics, nearly 10 years ago now.

Today, I invite you to play apprentice perfumer for a moment, using 100% natural ingredients.

CAN YOU WEAR PERFUME IN AN ECO-FRIENDLY WAY?

Yes! By turning to raw ingredients. It's that simple.

You can opt for simple hydrosols, like rose hydrosol, lavender, geranium, or orange blossom, to scent yourself simply and naturally. The aromas of hydrosols are fleeting, but they are an ultra-gentle product with no contraindications. You can therefore use them as much as you like.

You can also macerate (cold or hot) aromatics in oil, butter, or alcohol to transfer the scents, such as a vanilla bean maceration, dried citrus peels (warning: such a maceration is photosensitizing!), or other spices, flowers, or fragrant herbs, a bit in the spirit of enfleurage.*

*Warning: not all aromatic plants/flowers easily transfer their scent to a solvent (oil, fat, or alcohol). The scent of lilacs, for example, is very difficult to obtain naturally and to preserve (it is said to be a "mute flower"). Also, be sure to take basic precautions for macerations. We talk about it here.

The simplest method to create a perfume easily is, by far, to make it from essential oils.

SOLID OR LIQUID PERFUME? THAT IS THE QUESTION.

It's really a matter of personal preference. Personally, I prefer the liquid version in a small roll-on container. It's much faster to make and allows you to easily readjust the scents if needed. After the essential oils have had time to settle, you might decide the scent isn't strong enough or that the top note would benefit from more of X or Y. This is possible in the liquid version, but not in a solid version… Although you could also turn your roll-on into a solid version after making your adjustments! See, it’s quite flexible, hehe.

If a solid version is more interesting to you, it's super simple to make! You just need to add wax. A 1 to 5 ratio will give you a gliding but firm balm (1 part beeswax to 5 parts oil, i.e., 20%). Warning: pure beeswax has a scent all its own! That can be a plus or a minus. You could also opt for sunflower wax: it is odorless. We will opt for a smaller amount of sunflower wax since it is firmer, about 1 to 10 (10%), but don't hesitate to experiment with the ratios to find the texture that suits you. You will find the precise measurements to make a solid version a little further down.

TOP, HEART, AND BASE NOTES

This is what we call the olfactory pyramid.

It's a way to define the structure of a perfume and the notes we perceive as the perfume evolves over time.

Concretely, the smaller the aromatic molecules, the more fluid the essential oil will be, and the faster the scent will evaporate. Conversely, the larger the aromatic molecules, the thicker and more viscous the essential oil will be, and the slower its evaporation. In perfumery, we formulate our perfume with a ratio of different types of essential oils, depending on their volatility or their place in the olfactory pyramid.

Top notes (the top of the pyramid) are the most volatile, most fleeting scents. They are what we smell first. Among these are citrus, like lemon, lime, sweet orange, grapefruit, bergamot, but also lavender, eucalyptus, mint, and basil. It is the top notes that we will put in the largest quantity in a perfume.

Heart notes (the center of the pyramid) last longer and are the ones that reach our nose once the top aromas have dissipated. These are more floral, sometimes fruity or spicy scents, like true lavender, rose geranium, petitgrain bigarade, ylang-ylang, eucalyptus globulus, balsam fir, palmarosa.

Base notes (the bottom of the pyramid) are the most persistent scents, which remain on the skin for a long time, sometimes several days! These are more intense, woody, musky, or ambery scents, like black spruce, patchouli, cinnamon, vanilla, thuja, and tea tree.

COMPOSING YOUR PERFUME, DROP BY DROP

Now that you know the olfactory pyramid, you can compose your perfume. That’s where the fun begins!

Before you start, prepare a small jar with coffee beans. After smelling different scents, your sense of smell sometimes becomes saturated and you can't smell anything anymore. The coffee beans act as a kind of reset for your overstimulated nostrils.

1. Select between 3 and 5 different essential oils belonging to each of the 3 notes of the pyramid. You could eventually opt for more essential oils, but to start, it's always a good idea to keep it simple. If you choose 3 essential oils, you will need a top note, a heart note, and a base note. If you choose more, you can play with the dosage of the essential oils within the different notes.
2. Take the time to smell each of the essential oils you have selected. In a notebook, write down your observations: how would you describe their scent? Powerful? Light? Sweet? Floral? Woody? Ambery? Spicy? What memories do these scents evoke for you? Keep all this information in your notes; it could be useful for all your future experiments.
3. Choose the type of composition you want to make. Well, this is the part where I wish I could give you a simple recipe that always works, but the fact is that there is no universal perfume composition. There are thousands of different recipes and ratios. That being said, you can base yourself on a few standard ratios to inspire you and start your experiments:

1:1:1 – a balanced ratio, where each note is equal to 33% of the total composition. This type of basic composition will work well with essential oils that are balanced and not dominant over each other.

4:2:1 – a perfume with more dominant top notes. A type of composition you might choose when your heart and base notes are very powerful. For example: rose geranium, Indian verbena, and patchouli. These are very powerful and dominant heart and base notes, which we will use in a smaller dosage and which are often too intense in a 1:1:1 composition.

3:2:1 – a perfume with dominant top and heart notes, where the base note will act as the foundation of the composition.

CALCULATING THE NUMBER OF DROPS AND RATIO

For a 4 (top) : 2 (heart) : 1 (base) ratio and a total of 25 drops

1. Add up the parts of the ratio: 4 + 2 + 1 = 7 parts
2. Divide the number of drops by the number of parts and multiply by the ratio of each of the ratios

Demonstration:

Top note (4 parts) = (25/7) x 4 = 14.28 drops (we can round to 14)

Heart note (3 parts) = (25/7) x 2 = 7.14 drops (we can round to 7)

Base note (1 part) = (25/7) x 1 = 3.57 drops (you can round to 4)

For your roll-on, you will therefore use 14 drops of top note + 7 drops of middle note + 4 drops of base note, for a total of 25 drops, distributed across each category of the olfactory pyramid.

For a 5% concentration, we are talking about 0.5 ml of essential oil (which is 12.5 drops). You just need to redo the calculation above using 12.5 drops instead of 25.

Are there any precautions to take?

In general, for a perfume, you can easily use up to 10% essential oils diluted in a vegetable oil, since the amount applied is very small and occasional.

HOWEVER, some essential oils have cutaneous dosage limits that should not be exceeded, while others should be avoided in certain situations. You can refer to our manifesto for safe essential oil use and our short guide to essential oils during pregnancy and breastfeeding.

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